TV

Where are all the butch lesbians on TV and film?

With the significant growth of lesbian and bisexual visibility on television within the last 10 years, it’s been interesting to note how writers create and develop queer women characters. Specifically, the bulk of these characters are conventionally pretty, feminine with long hair, soft features and girlfriends who carry a similar aesthetic. There are exceptions, of course, but the reality is that butch women still do not have a place on the small screen.

Currently, there are only a few characters on television that are both queer-identified and what I will refer to as butch, but serves as a catch-all term for anyone that is genderfluid in presentation, meaning androgynous, stud-identified or masculine of center. Currently, the only regular characters that could fall into this category exist on Netflix (Master of None, Orange is the New Black) and Amazon (Transparent). These streaming series are somehow the only ones capable of creating three-dimensional women characters who aren’t defined solely by their preference for menswear, short haircuts, and beautiful women. Denise, Big Boo and Tammy, respectively, are three completely different individuals that, on their respective shows, bring a specific energy to their ensembles.

So why are they the only ones that exist? And what has taken Hollywood so long to provide us with these few?

Generally, butch women have been the ones cast as obvious lesbians up until now. Lea DeLaria‘s career is a perfect case study. She has played every butch stereotype in the book, including the predatory lesbian, which she’s done everywhere from Friends to The First Wives Club. This kind of role is par for the course for masculine of center actors like Julie Goldman, who has played parts such as Lesbian Mom, Bartender and Gwen the Bouncer, all variations on the same theme.

“I’ve played every butch stereotype there is except probably the one-oh, nope, I did prison,” she said, recalling her time spent on Faking It. “Usually, in a breakdown it says ‘androgynous, masculine, short-hair. Truck driver with masculine energy.’ Sometimes it does say ‘butch.’ On occasion, it says ‘butch lesbian,’ but they try and not use those two words, I find. I find they try and play around it.”

Noelle Messier has had similar experiences, playing roles like Russian Lesbian Hockey Player Workaholics and Basketball Player on The McCarthys.

“Sometimes they don’t say lesbian, but you know it’s understood,” Noelle said. “Butch cop, butch biker chick. That’s probably the word I see the most. I literally had, on 10 Things I Hate About You, I had ‘Butch Lesbian’ on my trailer. A lot of these characters don’t have names.”

What’s most unfortunate about these roles is that they make lesbians (specifically butch lesbians) the butt of the joke. Their entire raison d’etre is to be made fun of; not to add anything to the humanity of a scene.

“I’ve probably played six times, at least, the woman mistaken for a man bit,” Noelle said. “I’ve literally said ‘I am not a man. I am not a sir.'”

Noelle said she’s even considered saying something on set before when she felt like something she was part of was “borderline offensive.”

“There was a moment that I was like ‘What do I do about this? Do I just let this go?'” she said of one experience where a director was intent on her being misgendered on a primetime sitcom. “I mean obviously I’m getting paid to do this, and it’s a character, but the moment of feeling like I should say something-that this is not right.”

Carlease Burke, an out actress who is currently starring in NBC’s comedy Crowded, recalls the audition she went in on for her small role in Shameless as a lesbian trucker named Roberta “Bob.”

“What I remember the most is they were looking for a really large woman. And I didn’t think I was as large as they wanted,” Carlease said. “When I went to the audition, and I looked around the room, I thought, ‘There is no way in hell I’m gonna get this,’ because they were larger and much more hardcore butch women. I’m not saying they were butch, but they looked the part. And there’s no way I thought I was gonna get the role. I really didn’t think so.”

However, it appears that women of color are also often seen with a similarly limited lens.

“The funny thing is with my experience-whenever I get called in for anything butch, there’s always black women there-I don’t know whatever their sexuality is but I think they equate butch women and black women a lot of times together because black women are so strong,” Julie said. “For, like, police officers or security guards-I always go against black women. Always, and they usually always book it. [Casting agents are] thinking, ‘OK butch women and black women are the same in the diversity scope.’ Then you’re all there together like “What are we all doing here?” And then now we’re all competing for the same shitty part because there’s one security officer role and it’s gonna go black, or it’s gonna go gay. How are they gonna go?”

But when these are the only roles available to non-traditionally feminine actors, it can be frustrating on several levels. Both say they have been told to “soften their look,” which Julie uses as a bit in her stand-up.

“You spend years going ‘Should I be more feminine? Should I try to have longer hair?'” Noelle said. “I’ve gone back and forth so many times in that because I can go kind of go both ways. The thing is my soul and my heart tend to be a little more masculine, a little more butch, for lack of a better term-androgynous or whatever it is. In some ways, it’s a challenge for me because I get those roles, and for a second, I kind of go, ‘This is kind of stereotypical and kind of offensive.’ But at the same time, this is an opportunity for me to embrace that side of myself.”

So why are these roles being written over and over again? And why are the larger lesbian roles going to feminine-presenting actresses who are, more often than not, heterosexual in real life? There are even times when scripts call for butch or androgynous lesbian characters and cast someone completely different (usually an actress with some star power). Julie Goldman says that she went out for the role of Maggie in Younger, the lesbian best friend to Sutton Foster on the TVLand series from Darren Star (Sex and the City).

“When they were casting that show, in the breakdown, it said, literally ‘butch, androgynous, artist living in a loft in Brooklyn type.’ I was like ‘Fuck yeah, great! OK,'” Julie said. “I go in-usually it’s like me and some girls who borrow flannel shirts from their fucking friend, and a couple of other lesbos that I know that we’re always doing the same thing, and Fortune Feimster‘s there. So read for it, great, whatever. It said butch lesbian; that was the thing it was a butch lesbian part. Butch, butch, butch, butch, butch lesbian. Who did they cast? Debi Mazar. Debi Fucking Mazar. Is that butch lesbian to you? Where did that come from? That happens all the time. I definitely feel like I read for stuff that says ‘butch’ or ‘masculine’ or whatever and then it’s like ‘What?’ There’s a Debi Mazar type or whatever.”

I asked Darren Star about this at TCA this winter, where he explained how Debi came to the role.

“I don’t remember it being described as androgynous, but she was definitely gay, and we looked at a lot of different actors for that role,” he said. “We were open just to picking like who was really going to come in and make that part their own and bring something of themselves to the role…I love Debbie, I’ve known her for years, and then she read for this and I kind of thought ‘Wow.’ I just loved all that earthiness she was bringing to it and the quality of down-to-earthness, and quite honestly it was sort of like divorced, in a way, from kind of thinking about like, you know, a ‘gay’ character.”

Out lesbian Jen Braeden has written on shows like Finding Carter, Underemployed and Super Fun Night, all with lesbian storylines at one point or another, and said she never had issues pitching “less femme characters” in the writers room, “But when it would go up to the network executive level,” she said, “that’s where the pushback would come in.”

“I wrote a scene where a baby dyke has a meet-cute in line for the bathroom with an older lesbian,” Jen said. “Their connection hinged on the other character being a little dykey. Boyshorts were mentioned in my dialogue. I didn’t even need a butch woman-just a soft butch wearing boyshorts. But when casting started, all the girls up for the part of the were beautiful femmes. They didn’t even have a whiff of being gay. It made the scene non-sensical. It was really disappointing to me.”

Another instance on a different show, Jen said she created a soft butch character described as “adorably dykey,” trying to “make her seem cute and accessible.”

“I didn’t want the same mistake to happen again, so I asked the showrunner to please talk to the network about casting a non-femmey girl,” Jen said. “But once again when the casting videos started coming in, there was nary a butch in sight. Not even a soft butch. Of course, the showrunner could have fought for it, but showrunners have to choose their battles with the network, and she didn’t choose this battle. It’s incredibly frustrating.”

Joni Lefkowitz, an out executive producer of Chasing Life and co-writer of the feature Life Partners, said she never wrote a specifically butch character, but she is working on a script now that includes one.

“The reason I hadn’t tried until now is because it felt to me like the majority of lesbian representation in movies and TV used to be the stereotypical butch, and I was trying to put another type out there,” Joni said. “I remember when The L Word started, and it was shocking to see so many femmey lesbians, but it’s definitely shifted over the years, and now that’s the norm.”

Speaking of The L Word, the Showtime series was severely lacking in butch representation (Tasha was arguably the only butch character to ever be a series regular), but did include one of the most well-recognized androgynous characters of all time in Shane McCutcheon (Kate Moennig). The success of that character alone should indicate that there is a desire to see more like her, something Orange is the New Black tapped into with androgynous characters like Poussey (Samira Wiley) and Stella (Ruby Rose).

Still, writers (including the actors themselves) are working to try and make progress in the business but are finding those same doors closed throughout the heterosexist hierarchy of Hollywood. What creatives find story-worthy and grounded in reality, the networks and execs are not seeing as commercially viable, and that comes from the fact that they are predominantly straight, white men. These men are all too self-congratulatory for any facet of diversity they employ on only a handful of shows, which also happen to be the ones who meet the most untimely of ends.

Vera Miao is an out actress, writer and director who has been shopping a film, At First, she developed at the 2014 Film Independent Screenwriting Lab that has been widely applauded, but has not been able to secure financing to go into production.

“I describe it as a Before Sunrise for the Orange is the New Black generation,” Vera said. “They’re very much in this predominantly people of color community in L.A. which has a real diversity of gender expression, so there’s more than one masculine-of-center character in the story itself. But the story is not about their gender expression; it’s not about their sexuality, or their coming out story. Everybody’s queer, everybody’s cool. It’s a love story that takes place in one night.”

As a self-identified femme who generally dates butch or trans-male identified people, it is important to Vera that they be reflected in her work.

“I celebrate butchness in my personal life,” Vera said. “I think butches are the most beautiful creatures on the planet. It’s like my singlehanded job to be able to essentially reflect that level of admiration and love and reflect the butches I know. There’s never been a time where butchness was celebrated. It’s this sort of strange thing. I find particularly with butchness that it’s like the ugly step-child all the time.”

Vera compares the experience of butch women to the stereotypical Asian roles she gets in cast in, “manicurists or secretaries,” but only because she reads as straight.

“Hollywood traffics in the most part in reducible archetypes and on top of that, there are gatekeepers on what archetypes are allowed, and that’s it,” she said. ” And so I don’t think that Hollywood-Hollywood’s always going to be five steps behind.

In feature films, there has been a similar ratio in butch/femme characteristics and identities, but a few major titles have had significant butch leads in the last few years. Dee Rees‘s Pariah and Rick Famuyiwa‘s Dope included masculine-of-center lesbian characters who were also women of color. In the latter, Kiersey Clemons portrays Diggy, a tomboy lesbian who hangs out with her best male friends, playing drums in their band donning snapbacks and jerseys.

“I have a 15-year-old daughter and just sort of seen her peer groups and friends and it is clear to me we are living in a different-in a very exciting time,” Rick told me at TCA. “And so I just wanted to reflect the reality that I saw, reflect the reality of my kids’ world and the reality of my world, too. I remember kids like Diggy growing up, and so what was interesting to me when I was growing up was a very sort of-how do I say this? I guess now it’s just a natural organic part of how they live. There wasn’t anything different-embracing difference as opposed to having difference be something that pushes us away.”

Differently from most TV writers experiences with networks, Rick said he didn’t meet any resistance along the way from investors which he said he thinks is “a testament to the time.”

“I think we had all sort of built ourselves up, like we got our answers ready! But it wasn’t-it was honest,” Rick said. “We were trying to be honest, and the whole point of the character is we weren’t trying to make a statement. These are friends, and Malcolm happened to be who he is, Dev is who he is, Diggy is who she was. It wasn’t a conversation they had with each other; it wasn’t a conversation I was interested in as a filmmaker. So I’m happy no one was angry about it, in fact, it was quite the opposite. So many people identified with her and this group of friends. That’s really what I was after.”

Perhaps film could be ahead of television in this category if Rick’s experience begins to reverberate and pass along to other filmmakers like Vera or Kimberly Peirce, the out director of the Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry and the 2013 remake of Carrie. She has been developing Butch Academy, a feature she once described as “a fun romantic sex comedy … a little bit ahead of its time” for the last few years.

But where film and television both fail more often than not is treating the butch as the anti-sex symbol. Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, creator and showrunner of UnReal on Lifetime, has had better luck writing a butch character for the show’s web spinoff, The Faith Diaries. The character is played by out actress Dot Marie Jones, another person who has been cast as the stereotypical butch women on television during the course of her career.

“I feel like casting Dot for that role was a huge deal for me because she’s just a body you don’t look at very much,” Sarah said. “And for me, I’ve almost exclusively dated butch women in my life, and so it’s really complicated for me. Because when I see those women, they’re like beautiful and attractive and compelling to me, but it’s been really, really awkward to be in other rooms where people see them very differently and actually don’t see them as sexual at all. So I was really excited to work with Dot for that reason.”

“I’ve never gotten to do a heartthroby type,” Julie Goldman said. “but I did do, on The Mindy Project, get to play Niecey Nash‘s wife and that was probably the most normal time I’ve gotten to do that on a TV show.”

Despite the fact that she’s a major recurring butch role on television, Julie doesn’t find Lea DeLaria’s Big Boo on Orange is the New Black an exception to the rule, saying she sees it as an extended version of the same old predatorial butch stereotype.

“For me, Lea DeLaria in Orange is the New Black is like a guy; just like a guy. And then whether or not she’s in prison or not, she’s a womanizer, she’s gross,” Julie said. ” She’s like, to me, that character isn’t funny; it’s a prisoner who is big and beyond dykey. It’s like something that I just-it’s almost grotesque. Which there’s a place for everything, but if you’re talking about a comedy, I want my butch lez to be funny. I just want her to be funny, and at least they gave that a little deference in The Mindy Project for that one episode, that one time.”

“Ultimately at the end of the day, it has to do with a fundamental discomfort with the way in which butch women embody masculinity,” Vera said. “They’re just outsiders. There is no straight up exploration of butch as an identity and an experience and choice. That should be celebrated and of course, Hollywood’s not gonna do it Please. Come on. They can barely handle the most basic kind of characterizations of people who are not white, straight men.”

Vera is currently developing a series for Warner Brothers that has a butch character while Noelle Messier has several projects she’s written for herself to star in that she’s had trouble getting off the ground.

“I wrote a pilot where the character is-she’s a lesbian detective, and she’s very butch. And yet she’s still the romantic lead,” Noelle said. “It’s like, do you want to sell out and be more commercial? But for me it’s like, no, it’s the reason I act at all or write is to express myself and to feel more comfortable in myself because that, I find, is my biggest hurdle is being comfortable as who I am. Because there’s so much of that stereotype constantly raining on you, and the rejection that you’re constantly getting as an actor, and a writer you get that too, as well. But for me, it’s almost a battle for me to be confident in who I am, so it’s like every time I go one on of those auditions, whether it’s one of those butch auditions or whatever it is, there is this fear of not being able to be who I am. The more stuff I do, I want to be closer and closer to that. And the more roles I play, it’s the same thing.”

Julie Goldman, who is currently a cast member on Bravo’s The People’s Couch and co-hosts the Vanderpump Rules after-show, has struggled to convince networks that she is worthy of a show where she is one of the stars.

“We’re never able to be funny. I constantly try to write the character that I want to play,” Julie said. “Which is funny, silly, a dumbass, asshole, but that’s funny and likable. But isn’t predatory, isn’t trying to have sex with you, doesn’t fucking want to get with your wife, doesn’t want to turn a straight girl-or if she does, it’s going to be funny and not going to be sexual.”

In the recent past, butch/stud characters have been included as part of ensembles, but never leads of their own shows. This includes Snoop on The Wire, Bex Taylor-Klaus as Bullett on The Killing and Jeanna Han‘s “Predatory Lez” role as Sam on Scream Queens. But it looks like things could be shifting: After we spoke, Julie got cast in a new ABC pilot as a regular bartender character on the new unnamed lesbian/straight guy buddy comedy and will reprise her Faking It role in the current season. FX announced it was developing a pilot starring Cameron Esposito, an out comic who prefers blazers and sneakers and has a decidedly genderqueer haircut. And Showtime just picked up Ingrid Jungermann‘s F to 7th, the original web series starring Ingrid, a decidedly androgynous lesbian.

“[People would ask] why does it have to be cast that way?” Noelle said of feedback for her pilot starring a butch lesbian lead. “And it’s because that’s the way it’s written, and I want to see that. I want to be that. I think there are other people that want to see that, and that’s what exists.”

“I’ve had people-I wrote another one about a lesbian veterinarian: ‘Oh, why does she have to be a lesbian?” Because that’s the point!” Noelle continued. “That’s the whole point! It is, and it isn’t. Because what I want to see is she can be a veterinarian that happens to be a lesbian. And she can be a more masculine androgynous lesbian! She doesn’t have to be a pretty lesbian, and she can lead the show. Why not? Why can’t a butch lesbian be sexy?”

Thankfully there are butch filmmakers like Kim Peirce, Cheryl Dunye and Jenni Olson who are creating work that includes masculine-of-center and queer protagonists, and others like Sarah Gertrude Shapiro and Vera Miao who are also working to be inclusive and to capture our real communities.

“We actually had a hot tub scene,” Sarah said of working with Dot in The Faith Diaries. “And I said ‘We have a hot tub’ and she goes, “Not naked!” And I was like ‘Shit!’ My DP is also a butch lesbian, and she and I were talking about: ‘Oh my God! We want to see Dot naked in the hot tub so bad.’ We just wanted it. But then [Dot] said something amazing: ‘Butch swimming costume.’ And I was like, ‘OK.’ She’s like ‘Boardshorts, sports bra, T-shirt.'”

Vera says she hopes to see more characters like Denise, played by out writer/director Lena Waithe, on Master of None. Characters who are unapologetic about being a very real reflection of the specificities of our lives.

“She’s really upfront about it, like ‘I’m a soft stud. I’m not a total stud,’ and I love that she has the conversation in public,” Vera said. “I don’t know what percentage of people reading it understand what she’s saying, but there is this way in which she does have this swagger and this studness which is not questioned. It’s part of her character, what she brings to the character that I love because it’s not a conversation now about her butchness and how that’s hard or what challenges it brings up. It’s just part of who she is.”

But what makes characters like Denise particularly successful is that Lena herself had a heavy hand in creating her. The original role was written for a straight woman, and after show creator Aziz Ansari met Lena, he asked her to infuse herself into the role.

In a similar way, Fun Home has been a huge success on Broadway based on the very honest reality of a young butch lesbian growing up in a house with a closeted gay father. The musical, based on Alison Bechdels graphic memoir of the same name, is perhaps the most successful butch story ever to reach the mainstream. It doesn’t exist in subtext; there are songs about the first discovery of butch identity (“Ring of Keys”) and first lesbian love (“Changing My Major to Joan.”) So how can this success transfer from the stage to the small screen?

“The person has to be-in order to even speak butch, they have to have some kind of sexual magnetism,” Julie said about who could be the next butch TV icon. “I would just like to see how guys get to do it in comedy where they get to be idiots but they can be cute or they can be a lovable loser, or they can be hot, but they’re funny. That’s the part. It’s the archetype that a guy is doing a butch lez has to be given the chance to do, and that is going to open up, I think, the way. Because what people understand. It’s like the cast of The Big Bang Theory with all those nerd guys-make one a nerd lez. Why not? Do what a guy would do and make it a lez.”

But in a time when even Rachel Maddow has to wear feminine cut blazers and make-up on her own MSNBC show, will it ever be feasible that a butch lesbian could be given the chance to shine? One difficulty that Julie says she has run into is that networks only want a show about a lesbian if she is paired with a straight man.

“It’s like why do I have to have a fucking guy in it? We don’t need a guy in it. I’m the guy! I’m the fucking guy,” Julie said. “We don’t have to fuck, and we don’t have to do any of that shit. We don’t; we don’t have to do that. Why can’t they just go date and be weird and have adventures and not have to have some fucking third guy around that you think makes life worth living?”

Misogyny, sexism, homophobia, racism: All still very present in Hollywood, with only a few network execs willing to take risks with creating characters who reflect real diversity and real people.

“We’re not really given the time,” Julie said. “I do think that’s the problem with butch lesbians-people see them like men so why would you give a part to a butch lesbian when you could just have a man do it?”

Like any other need for representation of minorities, the lesbian who “looks like a lesbian,” the visible lesbian, is just as necessary on the big and small screens. Taking the case of Fun Home again, a recent Atlantic piece delved into the success of the play that is jokingly referred to as the “lesbian suicide musical.” One of the show’s marketers, SpotCo’s co-founder and chief strategy officer Tom Greenwald, told the magazine, “There is absolutely no reason why a 70-year-old straight male can’t be as emotionally fulfilled at this show as a 25-year-old LGBT person.”

And that is exactly the kind of thinking that needs to become a part of the conversation in Hollywood boardrooms. If writers are doing their jobs and creating characters that connect with an audience, it shouldn’t matter if they come in a non-gender conforming, heterosexual package.

“At the end of the day, where do we have a representation of butchness? It’s just an incredibly valid, affirming, beautiful choice that comes with a series of things, ” Vera said. “Like when you choose to publicly and defiantly say I’m not a woman, I’m not a man-I’m a butch, and this is what comes with it. How then do you represent through a story on screen?”

That is the challenge, Hollywood, should you choose to accept it.

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